“Father in Heaven, I thank Thee!” cried Thrax Barbatus vehemently. “Blessings, oh! blessings on the head of this noble and generous youth! Farewell, my lord! Never, never will I forget your gracious kindness to us helpless wretches.”
With these words he left the room, and Euterpe followed him. Quintus went at once to his curtained cubiculum,[206] undressed with the help of the faithful Blepyrus and soon fell asleep.
CHAPTER X.
“Really, Baucis, you are very clumsy again today!” cried Lucilia, half-vexed and half-saucily. “Do you want to pull that fine, luxuriant hair, that the greatest poet might rave about, all out by the roots. I have shown you a hundred times how the arrow is to be put through, and you always towzle my hair as old Orbilius[207] does the schoolboys!”
“Ingratitude for thanks, all the world over!” muttered the old slave, casting a last glance at Lucilia’s curls, her successful handiwork. “I suppose you would like to stick a pin into me.[208] Really, the young people of the present day are like babies or dolls. And if the gold pin slips and the plaits come down, then it is the old woman who is to blame and there is no end of the fuss. Ah! you naughty girl,[209] how do you expect to get on when you are married, you impatient little thing! Many a time will you have to sigh, when your husband is out of temper! Many a time will you say to yourself: ‘Ah! if only I had learned a little patience when I was younger!’”
“You are greatly mistaken,” said Lucilia in a declamatory tone. “The days are over, when the husband was master over everything in the house. What woman now-a-days will submit to a wedding with offerings of corn?[210] We have grown wiser, and know what such offerings are meant to symbolize—we are to surrender our liberty to the very last grain! So I should think! If ever I marry.... But what are you about? Will you ever have done fidgetting with that tiresome necklace? Do look, Claudia, how she is tormenting me!”
Claudia was sitting in holiday attire in front of a handsome citrus-wood[211] table, holding in her hands the ivory roller of an elegantly-written book. When Lucilia spoke to her she absently raised her soft, fawn-like eyes, laid the roll aside and stood up.
“You look like Melpomene,” cried Lucilia enthusiastically, while Baucis draped her stola.[212] “If I were Aurelius, I should have my head turned by the sight of you. How well the folds of your dress fall, and how admirably the border lies on the ground, oh! and your hair! Do you know I am quite in love myself with that hair; it goes so beautifully with the soft brown of your eyes. That dark fair hair, with a kind of dim lustre, is too lovely; my stupid, every-day brown looks no better by the side of it than a cabbage next a rose. Of course, too, Baucis takes three times as much pains with you as with me. Tell me yourself, is not this arrow all askew again?”
So speaking she took a polished metal mirror[213] from the table, and studied her coiffure first from the right and then from the left, while one of the young slave-girls, who stood round Baucis, came to her assistance with a second mirror.